Assorted thoughts on Mastodon and the Fediverse. (Thought I'd offer them up here for people to tell me I'm wrong before recycling them on T*itter):
👍 Some "communities" are rather well-represented here. Some unsurprising tech crowds present in large numbers: future-of-web types, people into open source and open standards, and industry-skeptic/social-justicey folks. The infosec crowd is fairly-well-represented here too. And as I said before, basically every notable blogger from the year 2005 is here!
👎 Startup/venture folks are not here in large numbers. (Yes, @hunterwalk and @mgsiegler are present!) Overall the chicken/egg problem is not cracked for these folks.
😂 Meanwhile, it's kinda funny how crypto people are entirely absent in the Fediverse, given their professed love of decentralization. (Perhaps they were not not so much into decentralization but rather recentralization of wealth around themselves!)
👍 Engagement per follower seems multiple orders of magnitude higher than on Twitter. If you're into engagement, this is the place for you. 😉 (Some of it can feel "reply guy" at times but a lot of it is quite good.)
👉 Anyone who likes Techmeme or Mediagazer linking to their tweets should probably start posting here ASAP. (Due to Twitter's unfortunate API changes and other factors.)
👉 I personally recommend cross-posting here, even if it's the same content posted to Twitter, and even if you're not prepared to engage much. It's good to give people the option to read you.
👉 Fediverse search (opt-in) needs to happen. Fight the naysayers. People are stumbling around in the dark here.
@gaberivera huge technical hurdle here... wouldn't really work well with federation unless there was a centralised database of all fediverse instances which would go against the decentralised nature of it all.

I know what you mean though, but it's a bit like the training level on a video game... once you get familiar with it you can literally find anyone/anything